Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

James Martineau

It is surprising how practical duty enriches the fancy and the heart, and action clears and deepens the affections.

Action | Duty | Heart |

John Milton

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.

God | Good | Kill | Man | Reason |

John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck

A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

Kill | Soul |

Joseph Joubert

It is an element of all happiness to fancy that we deserve it.

Happiness |

Paul Eldridge

The ideals men die for often become the prejudices their descendants kill for.

Ideals | Kill | Men |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

People fancy they hate poetry and they are all poets and mystics.

Hate | People | Poetry |

Robert Burton

He that stabs another can kill his body; but he that stabs himself, kills his own soul.

Body | Kill | Soul |

Saint Gregory, aka Pope Gregory I, St. Gregory the Dialogist, "Gregory the Great" NULL

Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.

Kill | People | Wonder |

Thomas Carlyle

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.

Kill |

William Hazlitt

We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb is taken off from our passions, and our imagination wanders at will. When awake, we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams, when we are off guard, they return securely and unbidden.

Dreams | Imagination | Will |

Thomas Traherne

Death cannot kill what never dies.

Death | Kill |

William Shakespeare

Those men who destroy a healthful constitution of body by intemperance and an irregular life do as manifestly kill themselves as those who hang or poison or drown themselves.

Body | Destroy | Intemperance | Kill | Life | Life | Men |

Anaïs Nin, born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Kill | Knowledge | Mystery | Sense | Wonder |

Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.

Kill | Poverty | Weapons |

Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers

It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff.

Fear | Good | Knowing | Life | Life |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary as seen from the heights and in the sense of a great economy is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it. Amor fati: that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe to my health? I owe it a higher health, one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it. I also owe my philosophy to it. Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit... Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were - pain which takes its time - only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put away all trust, all good-naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium - things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us "better," but I know that it makes us more profound.

Doubt | Kill | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Pain | Philosophy | Sense | Time |